Interactive Intelligence announced today it has purchased the professional services group of Alliance Systems and I had a chance to speak with the president of Alliance Systems Rusty Cone about this deal. Rusty deferred to Alliance Systems chairman Jon Shapiro about the reason for this transaction.
According to Jon: “Our core server and infrastructure business has been growing very rapidly and we wanted to focus our resources on increasing our manufacturing capacity, engineering resources and our global logistics and support business.”
I did get a chance to find out a bit more about the transaction however. Rusty explained he is happy for the 14 people who will now be part of Interactive Intelligence as they now have more opportunity to move up in the organization. Rusty says this was a very professional team and was built in 2002.
Perhaps the best part of this deal is the fact both I3 and Alliance can focus on their core competencies. For Interactive this means building communications systems for enterprise and call center customers. For Alliance Systems this means the design/manufacturing business for ISVs, OEMs and service providers. They sum this up as design, build, ship, support.
So there really isnt anything revolutionary here except this could signal a trend for I3 to generate more of their revenue from services which are generally more lucrative than other parts of the business. To be honest if the news was bigger I would have made a few more phone calls but it doesn’t seem to warrant this sort of treatment. One other thing… Rusty will not answer if any more M&A plans are in the hopper. I didn’t really expect an answer but it never hurts to ask. :-)
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